Flashing red in Benghazi

For months, questions have piled up about how and why U.S. officials failed to protect a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in a U.S. consulate in Benghazi last Sept. 11. We know the system was flashing red. We know there were warnings from security officers on the ground in that dangerous Libyan city and pleas for more security.

The search for these answers is about much more than doling out bureaucratic blame or seeking political advantage. Knowing what went wrong is crucial if Washington is to protect U.S. diplomats around the globe, many of whom serve in hostile locales. The mistakes in Benghazi must never be repeated.

The report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found that the State Department had "a clear and vivid picture of a rapidly deteriorating threat environment" in Benghazi, which should have jolted Washington to action.

Instead of closing the diplomatic post and relocating personnel to Tripoli, however, State Department officials batted away requests for more security and gambled that local guards and a skeleton crew of American security personnel would be enough to repel attacks. Officials compounded error with error: They didn't fortify the compound to repel attacks because the facility was considered temporary, Senate investigators found.

The report concluded that U.S. government officials may have been lulled into complacency because they focused almost exclusively on al-Qaida and had no "specific intelligence of an imminent attack" on the Benghazi consulate. That intelligence — that there was no elaborately planned attack — may have been correct. But U.S. officials apparently failed to account for a spontaneous and "opportunistic" assault by scores of terrorists with loose or ambiguous operational ties to al-Qaida.

In other words, by focusing single-mindedly on al-Qaida, American officials missed the larger terror threat that includes scores of nascent violent Islamist extremist groups shifting "focus from local grievances to foreign attacks against U.S. and other Western facilities overseas," investigators said.

That's a huge oversight. The U.S. needs to calibrate the threat to diplomats not only on what's known of the terrorists' plots and intentions to attack, but on their capabilities even in the absence of specific threats.

The report's devastating conclusion: "Despite the inability of the Libyan government to fulfill its duties to secure the facility, the increasingly dangerous threat assessments, and a particularly vulnerable facility, the Department of State officials did not conclude the facility in Benghazi should be closed or temporarily shut down. That was a grievous mistake."

President Barack Obama greeted the Senate report with a promise: "We're not going to be defensive about it; we're not going to pretend that this was not a problem — this was a huge problem."

Now, how will the White House and State Department fix this?

That should be the first question for Sen. John Kerry in his confirmation hearings to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. We also hope Clinton will follow through on her reported intention to testify before Congress on the Benghazi debacle.

One other thing we've gleaned from the report: The lapse wasn't mainly about funding. The Senate report found that the State Department's requests for security funding increased by 38 percent and base budget appropriations rose by 27 percent since fiscal 2007. The problem: Security upgrades in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq topped the to-do list.

The report doesn't shed much new light on why the administration's accounts of what happened in Benghazi were so muddled and inconsistent. State Department officials quickly distanced themselves from the White House account, which initially blamed an anti-Muslim video for provoking the attacks.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice was forced to withdraw her name as a potential nominee for secretary of state because she was still parroting that erroneous line days later, despite the report's finding that "there was never any doubt among key officials, including officials in the (intelligence community) and the Department of State, that the attack in Benghazi was an act of terrorism."

In the fallout, several State Department officials have resigned. More may come as new details emerge.

Let's hear how Washington plans to ensure that another system blinking red is not dismissed or ignored until it is too late.